Capitol Hill Stumps Anthropic on its Google Relationship

Capitol Hill may not have the best reputation when it comes to being tech-savvy. One may recall Senator Orrin Hatch’s infamous question to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg about how Facebook stays free (which a smirking Zuckerberg responded to with, “Senator, we run ads”).

But it was a different story during yesterday’s Senate hearing on artificial intelligence regulation, which featured testimonies from Dario Amodei, CEO and cofounder of OpenAI rival Anthropic, Stuart Russell, a University of California, Berkeley computer science professor, and Yoshua Bengio, a Université de Montréal professor. Legislators seemed surprisingly up-to-date. 

Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, for instance, asked Amodei about potentially setting safety breaks on AutoGPT, a viral AI agent that can automatically carry out a multi-step task, such as conducting market research. Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley brought up a recent Wall Street Journal article on the dismal working conditions Kenyan workers faced while helping OpenAI build a safety filter for its models.